Pages

August 29, 2008

If Beijing can, New Delhi can (do even better)

I liked the way Rahul Verghese penned down the article A wake-up call from Beijing on The Hindu newspaper (Thanks, Rahul!). I appreciate his thoughts and thinking. Here, I'd like to express a little bit of my thoughts, which coincidentally is in line with Rahul's...

Firstly, I think that everything starts with "I". If only I could blame and pat myself for every failure and success, I don't get a chance to even point a finger at others. Though "I" might sound egoistic, in this context it's fair enough to blame ourselves for our failures and take pride in the good things we do. In the context of sports, it's about setting up personal goals and challenges, rather than waiting for the government or the corporates to take action.

The second part is - "Stop looking at rules". As some people say, rules are meant to be broken. Unless we try the new approach, we will never get innovative. As applied to the state's selection policies, its about sheer innovation in this space. Take off the big-mouths and politicians from any sports authority roles, bring in the innovative thinkers. We need to take baby steps initially. It's fair enough to fall a couple of times when we learn to walk - Walking is the first step to running and subsequently sprinting!

In the context of the commonwealth games, there are two things our organizers must remember - Wear the thinking hat and get innovative, Learn from the success and failures of the Beijing games. In my view, the secret behind Beijing's success has been 5 key things -

The spent years of effort to study the success and failures from the rest of the world (Did you know how much time Beijing Olympic committee spent in building the glass globe? Remember the one that came up in the opening ceremony? Wait for more details in another post of mine)